Editorial: Avoid candidate lies with a little effort

Monday, April 28, 2014

We’re getting to the thick of the 2014 election campaign season and, as with any campaign season, we’re in for yet another clinic on the fine art of deceit.

Lies and half-truths and deceitful exaggeration and willful obtuseness? Check. Feigned ignorance and revisionist history and contextual misdirection? You bet. Personal attacks and character assassination? Oh, absolutely.

Well, except in Ohio, that is. In Ohio, it’s illegal to knowingly and publicly make a false statement about a candidate for office. In Ohio you can’t, for example, put up a billboard claiming a candidate for the U.S. House voted for tax-funded abortions because he voted for Obamacare. That is precisely what an anti-abortion group, The Susan B. Anthony List, attempted to do to former Ohio Rep. Steve Driehaus.

And even though the billboards never went up and Driehaus lost the election anyway, The Susan. B. Anthony List sued over the constitutionality of the Ohio law, and the case landed last week before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In any event, The Susan B. Anthony List is making a free-speech argument to enable exploitation of public ignorance and ideological extremism aimed at swinging elections based on profoundly shameless lying. And to that we say: Good. Have at it, and best of luck. Seriously.

Lies within the political arena serve a purpose. Most are patently ridiculous to anyone who’s done even a bare minimum of research on a candidate and the issues of a race. To everyone else, forehead-slapping whoppers insultingly underestimate the electorate’s ability to sense when it’s being conned like a mark on a carnival midway. Even if people don’t immediately understand how, most know when they’re fed bunk aimed at selling them something. With any luck, the attempt will motivate them to check out such claims, the worst possible outcome for those peddling the lies.

No one and nothing is ever as good or bad as they’re made out to be in the political arena. People get that. And the more strident the lies, the more instinctively skeptical people become. We’re talking here, of course, about the natural skeptics who represent most swing voters and die-hard undecideds. Anyone predisposed to believe that Obamacare, for example, amounts to a “government takeover of health care” which spends tax money on abortions is merely part of a base that never really swings an election anyway. But let’s not forget that President Obama did sell Obamacare with the infamous line, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which was deemed the “Lie of the Year” by several fact-checking organizations.

You might be saying, at this point: “What about the feelings of the candidates who get slandered?” Well, what about them? The number of candidates forced into an election against their will is very few to approximately none. The vocation absolutely requires a thick skin, and anyone who wants to the represent or lead people is expected to live up to certain standards and expectations. This is one of the reasons that the legal bar for proving libel against public figures is set so much higher than that for private citizens.

Of course it would be nice if our system encouraged and rewarded at-all-costs honesty from elected officials. What a wonderful world that would be. But that world hasn’t existed roughly since the days of Give ’Em Hell Harry, if it ever did. And, yes, we’re straddling, once again, the line between frank realism and hopeless cynicism.

In the end, this is a free speech issue, and free speech often amounts to deceitful speech. It’s a shame, but it is what it is. It’s who we are, and who we’ve always been. The good news is that access to and proliferation of balancing information has never been greater. You can extrapolate much about a candidate based on the lies he or she tells, if you make the effort.